Transformers Armada - Season One, Volume Two

by Madison Carter

Keeps the spirit, if not the action of the original Transformers.

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Having not kept up with the Transformers since around, oh, 1988 or so, I wasn’t really sure what to expect with the most recent DVD offering based on the franchise. I know some vague things about the abominable Generation 2 stuff, and that there was (to me, anyway) an ill-conceived line of Beast Transformers where they turned into poo-flinging monkeys. But the latest revival appears to set things right. Transformers Armada – Season One, Volume Two isn’t up to the standards of the original, but it doesn’t completely squander it away either.

The Transformers are still Autobots and Decepticons, and this time around a lot of the series focuses on little Mini-Bots, which serve in a similar way to the old Power Masters. Oh, and a good part of this half of the season deals with a really big robot named Unicron. Yeah, that one.

This isn’t the best series, and in fact, it gets quite talky. The robot designs look quite nice, but the humans look like generic anime characters, and worse, some of the action sequences are done in that style too, resulting in static figures being moved over backgrounds.

Rhino’s release of this four-disc, 26 episode set gets the job done without too many extras. There’s a bonus section where you can view various Transformers and by clicking on your remote, transform them from one of their forms into the other, but that’s it as far as extras go.

If you were a fan of the original series, but didn’t care for the other revivals, you may want to check this out. It’s not as good as the Robots in Disguise that we grew up loving, but it doesn’t completely go against what they were all about either.